The Narration of the Female Workers’ Coffins in Literary Works

Abstract

This article describes the human trafficking and humanitarian violence experienced by the Indonesian Workers ‘Tenaga Kerja Indonesia’ (TKI) in general and the Female Workers ‘Tenaga Kerja Wanita’ (TKW) in particular employed abroad. The thing exerienced by the TKWs is referred to as the coffin ‘peti mati’ by the writers through the poems and short stories in the Poetry Anthology Series One (2018) and Series Two (2019/2020) with the theme The Massage of Peace from the Land of Flobamora ‘Pesan Perdamaian dari Bumi Flobamora’. What is the essence of ‘the coffin’ and why what is experienced by the TKWs employed abroad is referred as ‘the coffin’? The paraphrasing method and the qualitative descriptive method and the structural and semiotic approach were applied to find the answer to this question. The result shows that the ‘coffin’ used in the poems and short stories denotatively and connotatively shows the suffering that the TKWs suffer from and how they struggle by themselves, showing that literary works have time, space and place for exposing different social realities, one of which is the tragic plight by the TKWs.